In the past I’ve been critical of John le Carré and I have never really understood why he has been held in high esteem. I have questioned whether his popularity is due to his name as it’s easily remembered and so I must admit I approached one of his classics tomes with some trepidation. Even though I hadn’t read The Honourable Schoolboy in about 15 years, I felt like a middle-aged man who has been approached on a social network site by a long forgotten school-friend, and invited out for a drink – full of trepidation as I was sure that there is a reason we have not kept in touch all these years.

This book is not an easy one to enjoy and it’s best read in as few of sittings as possible so that it does not get put down and forgotten.
John le Carré has seemed to write 3 or 4 different stories in this book and the narrative does not remain consistent and so as a reader you fail to get engaged with the story and the characters and by the end you think to yourself what a waste of time that was.

At the start, you think you reading an Emily Bronte meets James Clavell and the language is a bit stilted and unnatural. For instance the hacks at the Hong Kong club are almost speaking Shakespearean, where you would expect the rough as guts, war weary reporters of that era would be using more of a courser and colourful language.

The second story of the book is simply the boring story of an old man, Smiley, who has suffered a bad marriage breakup and is trying to manage this and has been drafted in to his old job. Smiley has confidence issues, tries to re-organise the Service, but he is still obsessed with Karla and surrounds himself with the most dysfunctional characters in spy fiction. Smiley is simply Colin Forbes Tweed without the personality or the team. Would I have enjoyed the book more if there was no Smiley? Hell yes.

The story of the protagonist Westerby and his travels round Asia are Graham Greene-ish without the language skills before he returns to Hong Kong where the story switches to Romeo and Juliet. When Westerby is in Phom Pehn and even though the author mentions it in his introduction that he did similar things, you feel that Carré toured the war zone in a stretch limousine as it all feels a bit disengaged from the action and you don’t feel the heat or the grubbiness of Asia. At no point was any suspense injected into the story making you fear for Westerby’s safety, and his romance and eventual swan song was just dull.

I would like to write more on this book, but I have lost enough time that I will never get back, so here are some bullet points:
Referencing other writers and philosophers – what’s the point? didn’t help the story or the character development
Slowness of the story building up to nothing
Was le Carré getting paid per word as seriously a lot of this was just inane drivel – A good editor could have reduced this book by 90%.
The femme fatale was just stupid (top secret mission for the SIS, but I’ll write to my dad and let him know all about it) and her pilot ex-lover was a waste of words
Not a spy story, but rather a mixture of stories, interspersed with the authors travel anecdotes, with a flimsy spy background.

In summary, John le Carré’s Tailor of Panama was ripped off from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and this time le Carré tries to outdo himself by ripping off both Tai-Pan by James Clavell and The Quiet American by Greene and with the added bonus of a really long boring pointless story on Smiley. This results in a book that has no real structure and no narrative flow. Why he is still regarded as one of the greats still baffles me.

I think I will stop reading le Carré now and maybe let Red Banner do reviews on his books from now on.